You Can’t Claim to Be Family If You Don’t Bother to Show Up
Family should mean support
I don’t think it’s even remotely a secret to anyone who has been reading my work that my girls are my reason. They are my number one. My top priority.
They are some of the best humans I know, legitimately. They are kind and loving and complicated and volatile and fabulous, each in their own way.
They literally own my heart, as I’m sure most mothers would say about their offspring.
I wouldn’t feel any differently about them if I hadn’t grown them beneath my heart, hadn’t felt them growing and moving — wrestling with tigers it seemed, with my youngest — inside my body. I would love them just as completely if another body had hosted them.
Love is not dependent on sharing the same gene pool.
Family doesn’t have to share your blood.
I have family members I don’t even know, and a lot I don’t want to know.
Some of the people in my family line are scarily not worth connecting with.
As a kid, we were kind of an island, my parents, brother, sister, and I. We didn’t have a whole lot of people who felt safe and loving, and when we moved from California to Kentucky just before I was eight years old, it felt like we had no one.
I never really knew my grandparents on either side, for various reasons.
I wanted so much more for my kids. I wanted them to be surrounded by their family, to know their roots, and feel connected to their people.
I wanted them to have two sets of grandparents who doted on them and made cookies with them and winked at them while they slipped a fiver in their hand, telling them not to spend it all on candy.
I wanted our house to be overflowing with cousins and uncles and aunts. And love.
I wanted them to know and feel love, so much that they almost drowned in it.
I worked hard toward that, and I still try to in a lot of ways.
But as I get older, and people who should care about my kids turn their backs on spending time with them and seem to not care about them pretty much all the time, I am more and more coming to realize that family is what family does.
And family isn’t always blood.
We have friends who love my kids and show up for my kids more than some of their family members ever do.
We have friends who haven’t missed their life moments and want to spend time with them, who make sacrifices to make themselves available for them when they’re struggling.
People who love them and see them as the complicated and wonderful humans they are, who take the time to look beneath their red or brown hair.
That is what family is — loving and sacrificing and showing the heck up.
You can’t claim to be family if you won’t show up. If you won’t be present.
If they would never even consider calling you when they needed you, you aren’t their family, I don’t care how much blood you share.
At this point in my life, and with my children losing interest in being around people who don’t do their part to seek them out, I want nothing more than for them to know that it’s okay to feel that way.
“You should never turn your back on family.” I have always thought that way. And I still do, to a certain degree, but if someone clearly doesn’t want to be your family, self-respect says there’s no need to chase after them either.
I expect my kids to treat everyone with kindness and respect, but there’s a difference between being kind and respectful and being family.
Anyone who doesn’t want to be there for my kids isn’t family.
Family is what family does.
And most of their family doesn’t even share their blood.
I’ll keep their circle small.
I want them to know their worth.
And spending time with people who find being around you a chore, people who don’t care who you actually are as a person, is ridiculous, whether they share your blood or not.
If you don’t care about my kids, there is no reason they should treat you like family.
Your choice.
And your loss.
You have no idea what you’re missing out on, which is the whole problem, isn’t it?
Before you go, check out Mark Goblowsky’s article This One Thing Can Transform Your Life, which I have conveniently linked below. ;)